Entertainment media and ideas are constantly changing and evolving. Compared to the film industry, which is over 100 years old, the video game industry has grown from birth to being larger than North American movie ticket box office sales in about thirty years. Within the past decade, massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) and virtual worlds have become more prominent, providing in a video game a variety of interactive simulated worlds where users can interact based on a dedicated theme (e.g., Club Penguin®), to achieve common goals (e.g., World of Warcraft®), or to create an alternate reality (e.g., Second Life®).
Typically, once a user completes a certain game or objective, the user does not replay the game using the same settings. When games were first introduced, the game might have only had one setting (e.g., one difficulty level) and, as a result, the user would discard or sell the game once the user completed the game. Game developers began introducing game variations in hopes of maintaining user interest for longer periods of time, e.g., using various difficulty levels, including unlockable content based on the user completing certain objectives, establishing game achievements to obtain gamer points in an online game community, and providing additional game content at some additional point in time after the game's original release, which can be incorporated into the original game. Additional game content is sometimes given away or sold as add-on packs, or may be downloaded over the Internet or other network connection.
As a result of the constantly evolving entertainment industry, the consuming public has come to expect a never-ending stream of new entertainment ideas and concepts, as well as new forms of entertainment media, and companies can proliferate by introducing such new games and forms of entertainment.